If you love the idea of creating data visualistions and think you can just drop into D3 and emerge at the other end.... well I hope you're right but the chances are this article will help set the record straight and point you down the _right_ road for your particular journey

People see the impressive output and naturally desire the ability to make it themselves, they ask how it is done and often hear “it was made with d3.” This is the start of the problem, because when someone hears that it was made with d3, they think “oh, I should go learn d3”. They go over to the documentation and see something like this:

The misconception at the heart of these threads is that d3 and data visualization are the same thing. That to do data visualization one must learn and use all of d3, and to use d3 one must learn all of data visualization. Instead, I like to emphasize that d3 is a toolkit for communicating complex data-driven concepts on the web.

Let’s examine a few common situations where people find themselves wanting to do interactive data visualization and how we might plot a better course for each.

Recently there were a couple of threads on Twitter discussing the difficulties associated with learning d3.js. I’ve also seen this come up in many similar conversations I’ve had at meetups, conferences, workshops, mailing list threads and slack chats. While I agree that many of the difficulties are real, the threads highlight a common misconception that needs to be cleared up if we want to help people getting into data visualization.